The poet William Butler Yeats had a passion for magic, and he offers us three principles of magic that we will explore through philosophical and scientific perspectives. Can we arrive at a scientific understanding of magic, beyond woo-woo? Following these principles will bring us into an exciting and mind-expanding journey.

Dangerous Magic 2: Principles of Magic—Yeats and the Extended Mind

n. patedakis

Note: This is a rough transcript. Since the Dangerous Wisdom podcast uses many names and terms that transcription software fails to recognize, a more accurate transcript is not possible at this time. But this version is as close as we can manage.

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Welcome to Dangerous Wisdom, a journey into mystery and a gateway to the mind of Nature and the nature of Mind. This is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, happy to be here with you so that together we can create a culture of wisdom, love, and beauty.

In this episode, we continue our contemplation of magic from the wisdom, love, and beauty archives.

Before beginning, I’d like to acknowledge a comment from a listener regarding the first episode in this series. Grace writes the following:

Dear Dr Nikos, Thank you so much for this delightful talk. I was so happy to be bathed in magic this morning. The thing I'm most left with however, is around archetypal ideas of death & descent and rebirth. I realise all my sadness at the state of nature & the world, is because I am living through a death & descent, with very little sign of rebirth. I wonder if you've already written about that elsewhere? Best wishes, Grace

Last time we considered the experience of magic, and as we inquired into it, we found that experience itself IS magic. We tend to take experience for granted, and to have fundamental confusions about the nature of mind and experience. But as we look with increasing care and sensitivity, we can arrive at greater intimacy with the nature of our own mind and the mind of Nature, and we find a remarkable magic.

For some reason it brings to mind the old line attributed to Arthur C. Clarke, “Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.”

Our mind is not technology, and in fact the quote shows how primitive our notions of technology are. Our own mind is so beyond all our science and technology that it may as well be a magic trick.

Scientists have no clue how to make the jump from a universe of matter to the experience of mind. We know all sorts of things about what happens in a brain scanner when people perform various tasks, but this tells us zero, totally zero, about the nature of mind or how mind arises out of that brain. In fact, it actually offers zero proof—again, that’s zero proof—that brains produce mind. Scientists like to claim that, but it amounts to hocus pocus of the cheapest variety.

Moreover, we only ever have experience to work with. As we have noted before, self-help gurus, psychologists, neuroscientists, and so-called thought leaders like to talk about the brain. They like to tell us about our amygdala or our reticular activating system. If any of them can find a way to improve the life of the world by pressing on their reticular activating system, they should win ten Nobel prizes.

We don’t change our life by means of our brain. We can only change our life and the life of the world by means of the mind. When we realize that mind does affect the world, we may already realize we have entered the realm of magic. And that is our subject matter.

Real magic.

It sounds like a philosophical mess, doesn’t it? How can we possibly engage in a serious dialogue about magic?

Let’s agree that we want to speak about magic in a serious way. Certain intellectuals criticize what they refer to as magical thinking, and the dominant culture in general takes a dismissive attitude toward magic.

Therefore, it seems a contemplation like this one either amounts to preaching to the choir or talking to a brick wall.

But contemplation means thinking, with an aliveness in the heart and an openness in the mind. Those who think they believe in magic would benefit from thinking freshly about it, as would those who think they know better. We need some humility.

Humility stands out as essential in the practice of LoveWisdom. It’s rather remarkable how arrogant we can be when it comes to what we know, what we feel certain about.

Humus, humility, humaneness, humanity, all of these share the same root. To realize our fullest potential as humans often requires humiliation, landing face first in the humus, or finally kneeling on the ground, in a gesture of broken-hearted openness, or feeling broken open so that the heart can be free.

We can usually notice a special quality in the greatest insights of our lives. That quality we could refer to as transrational or nonrational. That doesn’t mean irrational, but these insights might have appeared irrational prior to experiencing them.

This may seem a bit strange.

Indeed, a paradox lurks here. We could call it the passion of the soul. The soul wants us to think something we cannot yet think. This thinking threatens the ego, and ego uses reason and emotion as a defense against it. Both reason and emotion take offense to any suggestion that invites us to draw near to this new kind of thinking, but in our culture we often find reason more reactive in some sectors, and emotion more reactive in others.

It has become a commonplace to talk about moving out of the head and into the heart, but the heart has its reasons too, and our ego can activate our emotional defenses as effectively as it can activate our rational defenses. In every case, what we call reason and emotion arise as interwoven, but our practice of making a duality between the head and the heart creates an extra layer of trouble.

SO let’s not make that mistake. Let’s not speak about reason on the one hand and emotion on the other, and try to say magic is emotive and rationality lacks feeling.

Instead, let’s reflect on the ways we get defensive around things we don’t want to hear, and let’s acknowledge the possibility that our reason and our emotion can take offense at the suggestion that magic might be real, and that we can get rattled.

And let’s consider that we may have unconscious motivations, fears, and habits, and that our unconscious can get us to reject something, and to come up with convincing reasons and compelling emotions to help us avoid the passion of the soul, and to keep away a thinking we cannot yet think—in this case, thinking about magic.

Perhaps this makes sense already, or perhaps it needs a little more clarification. This is important, or else we cannot engage in contemplation together, and this will just be a bunch of words that you either agree with or not. The sense of magic we want to get at is too important for that. So it’s worth the little effort to arrive at a modicum of clarity and openness.

For one thing, let us discern a difference between thought and thinking. Thought is the past. Thought is an elaboration of what we know. Thinking means something alive and alove. It means something fresh and responsive.

We live trapped in thought, but we can liberate ourselves into thinking.

Let’s put it another way: If we can admit that in some way or other we could be more wise than we are now, then we simultaneously admit that a kind of thinking is—at the moment—unavailable to us.

Our wiser self could do this thinking, because of the fact that our wiser self is wiser. But, while we are still more ignorant, this thinking remains unavailable. Nevertheless, the soul wants us to do that thinking. The soul does not give in or give up on our situation just because we have gotten stuck, gotten trapped in delusions.

Calling this other aspect of ourselves wiser means also calling it more loving, more compassionate, more graceful, more beautiful, more inspiring, and more inspired.

The soul longs for this—as its true nature—and drives us toward it.

But, because this other way of being threatens our ego, we get into trouble, we get involved in distractions. In general, the ego manifests strange patterns of behaviors and thought when we are caught in delusion, and these patterns keep us locked in our suffering.

The poet W.H. Auden captured the essence of this strangeness in these famous lines:

“We would rather be ruined than changed

We would rather die in our dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.”

Rational and knowledgeable people are sometimes the most dangerous in this regard, because they have a lot of cleverness and information to draw from to make their avoidance of change seem sensible and mature. Of course, all of us are subject to these sorts of reactions, and plenty of highly emotional people avoid what threatens their beliefs. In some ways, the major problem in the dominant culture has to do with the ocean of emotion and the drought of critical thinking.

The political and economic system of the dominant culture deliberately plays on both reason and emotion, but it could do nothing without stoking fear, anger, and craving. Despite what many new age or alternative thinkers propose, we have not become too rational, but mostly too emotional.

It’s true enough that we don’t tend to face up to our emotions, but that still doesn’t mean we have all become too rational.

To say it again, What we call reason and what we call emotion go together.

Some of the more emotional people in our culture make no pretense to sound like they have carefully considered available evidence and made a rational analysis of the situation.

On the other hand, many of them do make such a pretense, even if they have in fact not thought very carefully at all, and have considered only biased or incomplete evidence. Rational and knowledgeable people do the same, for they may dismiss evidence and arguments that don’t align with their beliefs.

In other words, we face a sticky situation here. Any form of wisdom, love, and beauty can threaten the ego, and the more edgy the subject matter, the more likely our reason and our emotions will take offense, and we thus cannot really make a start.

On the other hand, if the wisdom, love, and beauty in question seems to align with beliefs we already have, there too we may hold on to the beliefs rather than letting go into a potentially broader vision, as we move from belief to critical experience.

In general, liberation means a release from some kind of false belief or restricted form of life, and that kind of release might be difficult or impossible to accomplish by means of reason or emotion alone. That means we have to consider what it means to ask our reasoning and our emotions to relax, but without giving up our discernment and our capacity to feel and to respond with compassion.

First and foremost, we have to maintain our ethical orientation. Just because we need to free ourselves from the grip of false ideas doesn’t mean we can open the door to evil. We have to think about magic ethically, and that includes thinking about the ethical implications of marginalizing magic.

That might sound odd. What are the ethical implications of dismissing magic, or disparaging it, or ridiculing the idea of magic?

And why would we do that anyway?

And what are the ethical implications of having the wrong ideas about magic? What if we embrace magic but have unskillful ideas about it? Even to say we embrace experience is not enough because we can lack critical thinking and sensitivity in our experience. So we have to move with care.

In this contemplation, We will consider three ways of understanding magic. Two of them we will consider briefly, as characterizations of the essence or heart of magic, and a third as a description of the principles of magic. These will give us a feel for the ethical implications of magic, and also the kind of radically new thinking we would have to do in order to think magically, which we shall mean as thinking skillfully, thinking spiritually and ecologically.

We can consider magic first of all as part of a philosophy of life, as a fundamental aspect of LoveWisdom.

Every philosophy must fill a Cosmos, must hold the Cosmos in its arms, and must help us to be embraced by the Cosmos, to gain intimacy with the Cosmos.

LoveWisdom means attunement with reality. It means joining the dance.

A philosophy or LoveWisdom that includes magic means a LoveWisdom that situates us in a participatory Cosmos. It helps us to dance.

We could also say that a magical philosophy, a LoveWisdom that includes magic, means a philosophy of life that sees life as sacred and as totally relational and interwoven—with certain constraints of course, but not with any solid barriers.

A LoveWisdom that embraces magic gives us a sense of profound responsibility, because it teaches us that we are connected to everything, and that everything we do matters. It teaches us that we matter, and that the World is alive and alove, that it is aware of us, that we participate in the ongoing unfolding of the mystery. We do not participate alone, but countless beings participate too, and we are lived by sacred powers and inconceivable causes.

Some of that may sound airy-fairy, so let’s focus in on the most important part: Magic as a sensibility arises from an insight into the total interdependence or interwovenness of all things. If we live in a relational world—not a world of objects but a world of living loving relations—

if we live in a sacred or wondrous flux and flow in which all things arise totally dependent on one another,

then we can reasonably arrive at a magical sensibility.

That’s one way to think of it.

A second way to think of magic views magic as an art of awareness. In general, we still cannot speak of a philosophical idea without a Cosmic context. So, an art of awareness can only mean awareness in relation to our view of the Cosmos.

To keep things simple, we can say that the world’s wisdom traditions consistently emphasize awareness, and many sages teach us that we live as if asleep in our lives. Any culture rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty orients its citizens to awakeness and awareness.

An art of awareness—we could also call it an art of attunement—means a practice that helps us wake up and realize a profound attunement with reality.

Such an art has at least two functions. One function has to do with knowledge and action. If we face a challenge, a problem, an illness, a crossroads, or any number of apparent barriers that require insight, we might try various things to move forward.

Most of the practices of the dominant culture belong to the same limited and limiting style of trying to break through the barrier. On the other hand, the wisdom traditions, including indigenous traditions, teach us various ways to wisely, ethically, and gracefully liberate ourselves, into larger ecologies of mind, so that an insight comes not so much from us as through us, and that insight will be not only good for us, but good for the community of life.

A shaman, for instance, may go into a trance, and they may journey into another realm to seek the cause and the cure for an illness, and so to help their community and to keep the whole community attuned to larger ecological realities, which we can also refer to as spiritual realities.

Generally speaking, the dominant culture tends to dismiss such things, but even in the dominant culture we know famous cases of people solving problems in dreams which they could not resolve consciously,

and we know of cases of illnesses going away—which we call spontaneous remission—but which also bear the marks of the influence of a larger ecology of mind.

We also know that the religious traditions of the dominant culture have stories of magic in them, including the staff of Aaron which turned into a snake, and the staff of Moses, which God turned into a snake and then back into a staff again, and which Moses apparently used like a magic wand to part the Red Sea.

Many saints and sages healed people and performed miracles, which means sacred magic. And nowhere in the Bible does the divine indicate that the divine itself will never allow magic. Obviously, the divine allows magic with the right intentions. Magic in these cases functions as an art of awareness that attunes with the will of the divine.

Many philosophers have taught arts of awareness. One of the greatest world philosophers of all times is still a contemporary of ours. Thich Nhat Hanh pioneered an engaged spiritual life, and faced tremendous challenges, all on the basis of his practice of LoveWisdom. He and his students speak often of relying on arts of awareness to carry them through impossible situations, giving them insight and poise to move forward in the face of otherwise overwhelming difficulties.

The wisdom traditions value arts of awareness most of all for their ability to bring us to Insight into mind and nature. If we don’t know the nature of our own mind and the nature of reality itself, then all our activity contains a hit-and-miss quality, and even our successes will come with unintended side-effects, and we often end up creating countless difficulties for ourselves by the way we try to solve our problems. Arts of awareness not only bring us intimacy with our own experience, intimacy with our own true nature and the nature of reality, but they also grant us more skillful, graceful, ethical, wise ways of working with our lives.

All of this coincides with the essence of magic. We could put the essence of magic this way: Magic means a synchronization of heart-mind-body-world- and cosmos.

It’s a practice of attunement that goes together with our participation in life. We inevitably participate in life, and magic has to do with participating skillfully, wisely, lovingly, and beautifully.

That’s a second way to think about magic.

For the third way, we will consider the words of the great poet W.B. Yeats. Yeats wrote the following passage. It’s a bit long, but it’s easy to follow. I’ll let you know when we reach the end of it.

Yeats wrote:

I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are—

(1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.

(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.

I often think I would put this belief in magic from me if I could, for I have come to see or to imagine, in men and women, in houses, in handicrafts, in nearly all sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain ugliness, that comes from the slow perishing through the centuries of a quality of mind that made this belief and its evidences common over the world.

Okay. That’s the quote.

Now let’s consider it with care. Depending on your experience, you may or may not recognize a rather startling fact about what Yeats wrote.

It’s something we might receive as remarkable, or at least extremely curious.

The three principles of magic happen to coincide with principles of modern cognitive science. We’re talking about serious work done in the past few decades, long after Yeats wrote that passage.

In other words, though we might feel skeptical about magic, and we might at first dismiss the principles Yeats uses to define magic, it turns out that these same principles are recognized as part of a serious scientific view of mind and life.

Given that magic has something essential to do with mind, this would not surprise Yeats, but it surely would surprise some of our more narrow-minded scientists, intellectuals, and fellow citizens. The metaphysical police might put on their riot gear if they hear about this convergence of science and magic.

The work of scientists like Varela, Di Paolo, Bateson, Rosch, Jung, Pauli, McConnel, Bohm, and others gives us a way to scientifically understand the principles Yeats offers. I’ll repeat some of those names in a moment, in case you want to look into the research for yourself. But let’s make clear in a general way that contemporary scientists have endorsed theories and validated findings well within the framework Yeats defines for magic. Full stop. We need headlines and memes about this. It’s nothing short of astonishing, once we go into it and let it get into us.

The dominant culture has done a poor job at incorporating the shift from classical to non-local physics, classical to non-local psychology, classical to non-local cognitive science, and classical to non-linear mathematics. But our science has nevertheless validated this shift, and we have more shifting yet to come.

We should emphasize that last point. When we enter the world of magic, we have to avoid the temptation to come up with a mechanism that accounts for these principles and their functioning. The primary thing has to do with our philosophical vision, and we have to recognize that the dominant culture science may yet have no explanation at all for some of the experiences of magic we could verify for ourselves.

Given their philosophical and spiritual significance—which means their ecological, cultural, and cosmological significance—we should first verify these experiences, not merely argue about them, or come up with some mechanism to explain them, or engage in elegance theorizing on the basis of a limited and limiting worldview which seems long overdue for a paradigm change.

But before we verify them, we have to begin with an ethical orientation to life, and situate ourselves in a philosophy of life rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty, because if magic doesn’t attune us with wisdom, love, and beauty, it will only create problems.

Now that we have made these general acknowledgments, let’s consider these principles of magic in a little detail from the perspective of cognitive science and critical philosophy.

The first principle goes as follows:

(1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.

Probing this first principle in some detail will make the others easier to understand, so that we can begin the process of experimentation and verification. Magic is not a belief or dogma, but something we must critically understand, and then seek to wonderstand by means of direct experience and verification.

We can look at this first principle as a kind of keystone or a mother tree in the forest of our thought. Our current monocrop forest doesn’t have this mother tree, and behaves with hostility toward it. But if we look with care, we may find that this tree belongs to our natural ecology of mind.

See if you can do something without thinking too much. Just respond as quickly as you can to this question: “If I asked you to point to yourself, where would you point?” Just point to yourself.

It seems an innocent question, or maybe silly. But if we inquire into it together, we may find some assumptions about ourselves.

Did you point to your head?

That seems significant. Most people probably don’t point at their head, which means the dominant culture’s science hasn’t gotten to every last bit of us. For many if not most of us, it still feels unnatural to designate ourselves by pointing at our head, despite the fact that dominant culture science reduces us to our brain. You don’t feel like a brain, do you?

Some people point at their body, maybe in the area of the heart. That seems interesting. Some mystical traditions locate the core of us near the heart, at least while we live the embodied human life.

But, those same mystical traditions would not say that we are really something localizable. Mystical realization gets us to see that we don’t fit inside a body. It is not that our body has a soul, but that our soul has a body. In other words, the body is INSIDE the soul, not the other way around.

The leading edge of the dominant culture’s science has begun to take this nonlocal thinking more seriously. While powerful currents in the dominant culture’s science reduce us to a brain, careful and rigorous science has accepted a weird suggestion: Namely, that we might see as deeply problematic any view that constrains a cognitive system to a particular location, including inside a skull, but also including inside a body.

Consider that again: What if someone asked us to point at ourselves, and we sort of laughed and said, “I can’t be localized. I can’t point at myself, because I am not in a single location”?

Wouldn’t that be a wild response, if we responded that way from a place of intimacy—not as a theory or a belief, but as an experience?

We might call such an experience rather magical.

But, in fact, it’s perfectly scientific as well.

The science has become sophisticated, relying on complex nonlinear mathematics.

But we don’t need all of that to understand the basic principles. We could perhaps put some of the basic discoveries about mind in various ways, but the simplest and deepest truth comes to this: Mind is relational.

We have a tendency to try and turn relationality into a matter of interactions between things that already exist in their own right. But the deeper relationality taught by the wisdom traditions and now integrated into cutting edge science indicates that relationality goes all the way down. We don’t find things that relate, but rather relationality gives rise to the fleeting processes we refer to as things.

The cognitive scientist Eziquiel Di Paolo gives a clear analogy to make the point. In a paper called “Extended Life,” Di Paolo wrotes, “As relational in this strict sense, cognition has no location. It simply makes no sense to point to chunks of matter and space and speak of containment within a cognitive system. Inspect a baby all you want and you’ll never find out whether she’s a twin.”

That’s a nice analogy, isn’t it?

Being a twin is something we cannot locate in a single body. It’s a relational quality. Being a mind is likewise not something we can strictly locate in a body. Mind is relational.

We can understand this in limited ways, and we can even get a sort of glimpse of it, but usually our ego cuts off any wonderstanding. It’s too freaky.

For instance, Timothy Leary made the LSD experience famous enough that, even if we have never tried LSD, we may have heard the expression, Set and Setting. Set and Setting means that the context of the LSD experience profoundly affects the experience itself. That may seem minor. It’s not.

Keep in mind the meaning of psychedelic. The word psychedelic means mind manifesting. These medicines show us how mind manifests—they show us the manifesting of mind. And people discovered what the wisdom traditions, including many indigenous traditions, have taught for millennia: That mind manifests relationally.

And that means we have to go further than our initial thought that a mind manifests in a context. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about an LSD experience—which just makes the nature of mind and its capacities potentially more obvious—or we are talking about the difference between how we are with our boss and how we are with our spouse or our dog. It is not that our mind manifests differently in each of those contexts, but that mind itself is the interdependent arising of contexts.

Let us say that again, and contemplate it: Mind is the mutual arising of contexts. Once we say that, we have really said mind is the mutual arising of all things, because we lose the duality between context on the one hand and things IN a context on the other. Mind is not a relationship between things that already exist. Rather, mind is relationality itself, which isn’t a thing.

That should seem like a lot to take in. We can back that up a bit and say, Mind is the interdependent arising of a situation or a holistic happening.

Put simply: How you are depends on how I am, and how I am depends on how you are.

For instance, When you get home and your dog comes running up to you, your mind changes, and so do you.

When you live in a built environment, with plastic, and screens, and flat surfaces, and sharp edges and corners, and artificial light, and machine noises of all kinds, that’s you, that’s your mind.

When you instead live in a place where you primarily sense grasses and trees, branches and leaves swaying, rivers rolling and whispering, birds singing and flying, horses galloping and calling out to each other, that’s you. That’s your mind. All of that is making you, and you are making all of that.

As far as context goes, context becomes a problematic concept, because we habitually think that we have a mind, and it changed because of the context. The science and the LoveWisdom tell us a different story.

When we refer to the science here, we refer to serious work that anyone can read into and evaluate. We can find the major theories and hypotheses by looking up things like enactive cognition, extended cognition, and nonlinear dynamics as applied to cognitive science. Some of the major theorists and investigators includes people such as Francisco Varela, Ezequiel Di Paolo, Gregory Bateson, Eleanor Rosch, Carl Jung, Stan Grof, and philosophers like Evan Thompson, Alva Noe, and Anthony Chemero. It’s all serious work.

These scientists and philosophers merely put into technical language the insights of the wisdom traditions around the world.

Together, the science and the LoveWisdom tell us that our mind depends totally on what we think of as NOT our mind. In rather narrow terms, our mind is constituted by what we call context—not merely affected by it, but constituted by it—and the reverse is true as well, which means total interwovenness.

Our mind thus transcends our skull and our skin. And because of how freaky it is to think of mind transcending the skull or the skin, we remain like fugitives trying to hide behind our own skin.

The philosopher Arthur Bentley put this general problem in stark terms. He wrote something simply marvelous, an essay in which he invites us to see that the human skin itself is what he refers to as “the one authentic criterion of the universe which philosophers recognize” when they evaluate knowledge and knowing. Let’s think that through again: Human skin is the one criterion in all the universe that philosophers agree on when they evaluate knowledge and knowing. He means academic philosophers, and he means all of us affected by conquest consciousness, because we are all philosophers.

We are all philosophers and Everything we do depends on knowing.

We have come together now to ask what we know about magic. Do we know it exists? Do we know there is no such thing?

How do we know the world?

Do we know the nature of our own mind?

Do we know the nature of reality?

But, without knowing our own nature and the nature of reality itself, how can we ever expect our actions to turn out for the very best?

This is the whole problem Socrates dealt with. He saw his fellow Athenians going around doing all sorts of things: Making art, making money, making love, making war. He said, “Listen, people . . . Athens is a great empire. But none of you seems to know the true nature of your own mind and the true nature of reality. That means all the stuff you’re doing is based on confusion and ignorance. You don’t think so, because you don’t know any better. You think you know what you’re doing because you have gotten rich and won some wars. But reality will catch up with you. No lack of wisdom goes unpunished. So, Athens is going to fall apart.”

That’s what happened.

Socrates only showed people that they didn’t know what they thought they knew. Keep in mind, they really thought they knew. They thought they knew what they were doing, and thought they knew what they were talking about. We see this all the time when our billionaires act like they know what they’re talking about, simply because they’re rich. Our politicians, economists, coaches, and self-help gurus all act like they know what they’re talking about.

When it comes to magic, skeptics and believers alike act like they know what they’re talking about. But do they? On what basis do they think they know?

Arthur Bentley realized everyone shares the same basis for thinking they know. He was talking about professional philosophers, the academic types, but we are all philosophers, and we all have to run our lives on the basis of what we think we know. We do what we think we know. We don’t go around flying blind. But when we think we aren’t flying blind, are we actually flying blind?

Bentley said it this way: He said all of us inherently and habitually relate to knowledge as “a capacity, attribute, possession, or other mysterious inner quality of a “knower””. Isn’t that basic?

We think of knowledge as belonging to a knower. And we habitually behave as if this knower lives inside a body. We further behave as if that body is walking around in a world, as if the world is a mere setting, a mere stage, and we are the performer, the player on the stage.

It doesn’t matter if we are a professional philosopher, or a physicist, a politician, an economist, an artist, or a plumber.

Bentley says that this should all seem crude.

Is it stupid to suggest everyone bases everything they know, and thus everything they do, on the foundation of skin?

If we look at our actual behavior, Bentley seems to imply that we should find it a bit crude or confused. Why would reality have gaps? Why would we think we can walk around inside a bag of skin, cut off from the living ecologies and spiritual realities that we seem totally dependent on, and which seem to flow through us?

But we do this, don’t we? It’s just that we made it so habitual as to be totally invisible. We hide ourselves from ourselves by means of our habits of perception, thought, speech, and activity in general.

And our culture reinforces all of this, because we seem to need this view of self and mind in order to perpetuate conquest consciousness.

In other words, the whole history of the dominant culture is the history of beings hiding behind their skin. And this behavior leads to ecological catastrophe.

Ecological thinking goes against this conquest consciousness. It involves intimacy, and an immediate sense of interwovenness, such that all apparent boundaries are relative.

At first, we might think of the skin as ecologically more akin to the surface of a pond, or maybe akin to the soil of a forest.

The philosopher Tim Ingold wisely pointed out that we don’t really need to draw an analogy between our mind and the soil or the ground in general. He realized we cannot possibly make a firm distinction between the two.

Rather than being confined within our skull, our mind extends along pathways development, exactly like roots, shoots, flowers, and fungi.

Ingold points out that what we may call the ground of knowing is not some sort of interna; substance or substrate that resembles the ground we think of as outside ourselves, but in fact the ground of knowing is the ground we walk.

This is a revolutionary thought. Instead of our habit of experiencing and doing our walking as a behavioral output of a mind inside a bag of skin, walking is itself thinking, and the thinking of walking differs from the thoughts of a supposed thinker inside a bag of skin.

The thinking of mindful walking, and the thinking of walking mindfully in wild places, differs fundamentally from the thought of someone hiding inside a bag of skin, sitting in an office or other built environment.

And let us notice with care and attention that religion and philosophy—as a matter of beliefs we have inside our skin—differs radically from religion and philosophy in relation to living ecologies, the wider community of life, and in relation to the Cosmos itself. The dominant culture is happy with beliefs we keep inside a bag of skin, especially when we use them to control what other people do with their bag of skin.

But the dominant culture has shown incredible resistance to the suggestion that land can be sacred, that power and place go together, and that we have a responsibility or obligation to non-human beings and non-human patterns of energy and intelligence.

Most of us have no sense of the sacredness of the land where we live, and no real idea of the processes of life unfolding where we live, no connection with the beings, the trees, the food the medicines, the animals living where we live—or, the beings who should be living where we live, but who got evicted, perhaps many years ago, in order to create the built environment.

Then of course we hop on airplanes and go wherever we want, perhaps thinking we can go to someone else’s sacred place and know it because we paid for our ticket. We don’t have that hubris consciously. Consciously we may tell ourselves and everyone else that we are making a sacred pilgrimage or some other nice story. But our human privilege and conquest consciousness still directs the show. We don’t behave as if we would have to live in a place a long time, and in humility, and with great passion and care, come to know the place and allow it to know us—to allow knowing to happen through our interwovenness with the place.

As a generalization about the dominant culture, we can say we have no real connection to place, no sense of the sacredness of the land, and thus no sense of countless sacred potentials for our own thinking. We behave as if we could think “in” a landscape, as if ecologies serve as the backdrop for our thinking, but instead, our best thinking arises as interwoven ecologies, alive, alove, and sacred.

When we take these things to heart, our self becomes more noble, more dignified, and far more expansive. As Paul Shepard wisely noticed, it liberates us because, as he put it, “the beauty and complexity of nature are continuous with ourselves.”

Our thinking can become the very functioning of Nature, rich with beauty and complexity, and lacking the complicatedness of our habitual thought. Our thought is complicated, but not complex; it is elaborate and at times novel, but not profoundly beautiful and original. Worst of all, our habitual thought comes from delusion and leads to further delusion, and that’s why we have thought our way to climate catastrophe, with Nobel prizes and Macarthur awards and all manner of other celebrations of our habitual thought along the way.

He have again discerned a difference between magical consciousness and conquest consciousness. Nature is magical, the Cosmos is magical. and conquest consciousness fears magic and tries to conquer it, and it uses science and technology, as well as education, politics, economics, and everything else it can to accomplish that conquest.

We have begun to think of the cultivation of magical consciousness as an act of rejuvenation and care in skillful rebellion against the conquest consciousness of the dominant culture. We have begun to establish an intimacy between magical consciousness and ecological or spiritual consciousness.

We need to go a little further into these ideas, and a little further with this first principle of magic, and we will do that next time, and try to get into the other two principles as well.

Yeats has offered us a wonderful crystallization of the principles of magic, and you might want to continue to reflect on the whole passage, and reflect on the ways our thinking and being, our living and loving, can become more noble, more dignified, more expansive and creative as we allow the possibility of magic to open us. Our thinking can become the functioning of Nature, which is magic.

If you have questions, reflections, or stories of magic to share, get in touch through wisdomloveandbeauty.org and we might bring some of them into a future contemplation.

Until then, this is dr. nikos, your friendly neighborhood soul doctor, reminding you that your soul and the soul of the world are not two things—take good care of them.